11. Eden
EDEN
There are eleven more bikes in the lot than there were on Friday.
I count them through our window while I fight the zipper on a dress. Men I don’t recognize stand in the gravel wearing the same crown and skull as Viper’s, different rockers across the bottom.
National’s men. They rolled in last night, and the clubhouse has been full of strangers ever since.
Viper comes in and catches me staring at the lot.
“How long are they staying?” I ask.
“Until the Warriors understand what they’d be starting.
” He pulls a clean shirt over his head, careful of the bruise the bat left across his shoulder.
“Saber and two national officers are delivering the message to Nitro’s door in person.
Any Warrior crosses into our territory for any reason, he doesn’t ride home. That’s the whole war for now.”
“For now.”
He nods. “It’s the club’s burden, Eden. Not yours. You go to class. You study. Those are the only things you worry about.”
He lifts my cut off the hook by the door—black leather, PROPERTY OF VIPER stitched on the back—and holds it out. “Wear this while National’s men are here.” He pauses. “I’m asking, not telling.”
“I was planning on it. But why is it so important?”
“These men don’t know your face. They know two kinds of women at a clubhouse, and a girl walking around without a claim reads as the other kind. The cut means they keep their hands in their pockets and their mouths respectful. I’d rather the leather do that work than my fists.”
“The other kind.” I take the cut from him. “You mean a sweetbutt.”
His eyebrows go up a fraction.
“Shelby and Bree taught me the vocabulary at the barbecue,” I say. “Club girls. Around for the party and whoever’s at it. They don’t belong to anybody, so nobody protects them, and nobody has to be polite.”
“That sums it up,” he says.
I run my thumb over the white stitching of my cut. I’d wear it to bed if the zippers didn’t bite.
I turn to the mirror, and the dress zipper defeats me again. He crosses the room and draws it up my spine with two fingers, slower than he needed to.
The cut goes on over it. Viper smiles when he sees it on me.
“You don’t have to come to my parents’ house tonight,” I say. It’s the third time I’ve said it today. “I mean it. You can drop me at the end of the street. He’ll be civil to me. I can’t promise how he’ll act toward you.”
“Eden.”
“I’m serious. You sat through one of his sermons. And you’ve heard me talk about him. You know what he’s like.”
He takes my face in both hands and tips it up.
“I’m yours. If it’s important to you, it’s important to me.” His thumbs frame my jaw. “You get what you want… like a house. I put in an offer today.”
I go still under his hands. “The Cholla Road house?”
He brushes his lips over mine. “You wanted the porch.”
“Tanner.” My eyes sting, and I blink it down. “You put in an offer, and you’re telling me now? While I’m panicking about pot roast?”
“Figured you could panic about both. More efficient.”
A laugh breaks out of me, the ugly snorting kind.
“We should hear back within forty-eight hours,” he says, and hands me my helmet off the dresser. “Let’s go.”
We roll up my parents’ street, the engine announcing us three houses early, and every curtain on the block twitches.
A porch lamp comes on at our neighbor’s house.
I press my cheek between Viper’s shoulders and wave at her window like a parade queen, and his laugh moves through his back and into me.
My mother answers the door before we knock.
She’s in her good apron, the one with the strawberries. She smiles at me and then looks at my man and doesn’t flinch.
“You must be Viper,” she says. Not Tanner. Viper. I’m the only one who gets to use his real name, and only when we’re alone.
“Ma’am.”
“Supper will be ready in ten minutes.”
She looks at the leather on my shoulders, reads the white stitching, and says nothing about it. Then she waves us both toward the kitchen, where the roast is resting on the stove, and she takes the rolls out of the oven.
I hang the cut on the hook by the kitchen door, next to her aprons. I didn’t come here to fight tonight.
“Mama, how did you get Daddy to agree to this?”
“I didn’t ask him to agree. I set the table for four and told him who was coming.
” She removes the meat from the roasting pan and puts it on a serving tray.
“He said that you made your choice, and that choice is a man he didn’t approve of.
And I told him that choice is not going to cost me my daughter.
Not over his pride. I’ve spent decades keeping that man comfortable. I won’t lose you to it.”
She says every bit of it with Viper standing right there in the doorway. She wants him to hear it.
I can’t speak. My mother has never once stood up to my father.
She squeezes my arm. “Now help me carry the food.”
The table is the same table. My father’s Bible sits beside his plate, same as every supper of my life, the ribbon marking whatever verse he’s loaded for the evening.
What’s different is the tattooed man across from me. The man I chose.
My father reaches for the Bible.
My mother lays her hand on the cover. “Grace will do tonight, Howell.”
He looks at my mother the same way he’s looked at me my whole life when I’ve disappointed him. She doesn’t look down. He does.
He says grace. It’s short. It might be the shortest prayer of his life.
We pass the potatoes. The roast. My mother carries the conversation, asking about my clinical hours, about whether the college parking situation has improved.
Her eyes flick to mine on that one, because she’s seen the news footage, everyone has, and parking situation is the kindest possible phrase for it.
“It’s been handled,” I say.
My father sets down his fork.
Here it comes. I brace for the sermon he’s itching to give. I have a lifetime of practice sitting through it. Not tonight.
I wait for him to open his Bible, but he doesn’t.
He looks at me, and he asks one question.
“Are you safe?”
The whole table goes quiet. Viper doesn’t answer for me. My mother doesn’t smooth it over. The question hangs there, mine to take.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m safe. And I’m happy.”
He takes that in. His thumb runs the edge of the tablecloth. Whatever he was going to say next gets swallowed. I’ve spent my life swallowing things at this table. I never once watched him do it.
This is the point where I’d typically get a lecture.
But miraculously, he goes back to his plate and eats food I’d bet he can’t taste.
After a few minutes, he turns to Viper.
“Where will she live?” His mouth thins. “The clubhouse can’t be long-term.”
“We put in an offer on a house,” Viper says. “Three bedroom. Quiet street.” A pause. “It has a porch. She wanted the porch.”
“She always liked a porch.” My father says it almost to himself, like a fact he forgot he knew about me. “Her grandmother had one. She’d sit out there shelling peas with her until dark.”
“I didn’t know that,” Viper says.
My father nods and sets down his knife.
“Eden. Your tuition.” He looks at me, not Viper. “I’ll pay it. Taking your schooling from you was wrong. I knew it when I said it.”
He has never told me he was wrong. Not once, about anything. I don’t trust myself to speak, so I don’t.
“It’s handled,” Viper says. No edge in it. “Her school, the house, whatever she needs. She won’t go without.”
My father holds his eyes across the table. He can’t bless this. He won’t pretend to. But the man sitting at his table is taking care of his daughter, and he’s been told, plainly, that he can stop carrying that worry.
“Good,” he says.
My father goes back to his roast, and my mother refills Viper’s sweet tea without being asked, and the supper continues.
Nobody storms off. Nobody quotes Leviticus.
Later, my father asks whether the house has good bones. Viper says yes, and they leave it there.
It’s not good. It’s not even close to good.
It’s a start.
At the door, my mother hugs me, then looks up at Viper.
“You’ll bring her again,” she tells him. “This isn’t a one-time supper. We’re family now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
My father stands behind her in the hall. He doesn’t offer his hand, and Viper doesn’t reach for it.
But he watches me put on a leather cut, and he reads the white stitching.
He says nothing about it at all.
What he says is, “Drive careful. The county road’s bad at night.”
He knows exactly what found me on a county road at night. We both hear everything underneath it.
“Always,” Viper says.
We leave my parents’ house, hand in hand.
I swing on his bike behind him and lock my hands around his waist.
The streetlights quit at the edge of town, and then it’s saguaros and dark and the road home. I press my cheek flat against his back, where the engine and his breathing run together into one rhythm I know now.
At the stop sign by the feed store, his gloved hand drops to my knee and squeezes once. You okay? I squeeze his ribs. Yeah. I am.
I’m a different woman than I was when I came across Viper on that road.
The good girl is gone, and she isn’t coming back.
Even though my father doesn’t like my choices, he decided not to lose me over them.
And something is waking up in my mother. She stood up to him tonight. And I want to be around when she finally comes out of her shell.
Viper opens the throttle. The desert pours by in the dark, and every mile of it is carrying me toward an eventual porch on Cholla Road and a life I chose.
I hold on tighter, and we ride home.